


nine to one minutes

by skuls



Series: Half-Light Universe [9]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Half-light universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 10:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7099939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five ways that "half-light" could have gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nine to one minutes

**Author's Note:**

> Because apparently I'm never going to let this fucking universe go. This was fun to write. IDK what that says about me. 
> 
> Also: please read "half-light" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/6012078/chapters/13800327) first, because otherwise this all sounds kind of crazy.

_ one where they don’t remember _

She dreams about a cloudy sky and an alleyway, taste of copper, and red, red, staining everything. And she dreams about her new partner, holding her. When Dana wakes up in her hospital room, after the car crash, she feels a little more than confused. 

Her brother shows up at the hospital and interrogates her about her partner, the nature of these cases, wondering if it’s too dangerous for her. “It was an accident, Bill,” she says sharply. “I’m not giving up yet.” She doesn’t want to give up, because she can still feel the weight of Mulder’s arms around her in the dream. She visits him in his hospital room and he apologizes several times, his fingers warm as they curl around hers. (The strange thing is that it isn’t strange, holding his hand.)

They go home as soon as they’re well enough, don’t bother poking around the case anymore. Dana never mentions the weird dreams she’s been having since the accident. (Almost like some whole other universe, whole other life, because the dreams are vivid and fit together like puzzle pieces, but most of the dreams are not pleasant.) Mulder would believe her, she thinks as he presents some paranormal slide show to her with a flourish, if she told him. She kisses him one night after a long case, and he kisses her back like he’s been waiting. 

And it’s okay, for a while. He makes terrible coffee and they drink it barefoot in the kitchen, she’ll sneak out of his apartment early so that no one sees them and reports them, she’ll kiss him when he does something almost irritatingly endearing. It goes against everything Dana thought when she joined the Bureau, to secretly be dating her partner, but somehow, she doesn’t care about that. The bad version of the dreams have almost completely stopped, and the good ones replace them. She suggests they go play baseball.

(The only thing that’s strange is that he refuses to call her Dana, only Scully, and what’s even stranger is that she doesn’t mind.)

She has a nightmare one night, a new one, of comas and cancer and watching Mulder descend into the ground. Everyone calls her Scully in her nightmares. She thinks maybe Mulder had a worse one. In the morning, he’s gone, with nothing but a scribbled note on the bedside table. _ That’s not going to happen to you. It's not.  _ She doesn’t know what it means, and tries his cell phone number again and again, but it doesn’t go through every time. She drives to his apartment and finds it empty. She steals his sweatshirt and leaves her key on the counter.

He’s officially quit the X Files, so Dana resigns, too, and drives to the hospital to fill out an application. She doesn’t believe in the existence of extraterrestrials, and she can’t find his sister. 

She has one last dream, where Mulder leaves, and the unfamiliar and yet eerily familiar weight of a baby in her arms is ripped away, and she knows it’s her fault. They both die at the end, and as much as Dana misses him, part of her is glad he’s gone.

 

_ one where they both didn’t make it back _

Mulder dies in her arms. The blood doesn’t come out of her suit. 

Scully blames herself for pursuing a suspect alone. He caught up with her and took her bullet. She blames herself for being too distraught to try and do something,  _ anything _ , to save his life past pressing her palm against the wound and praying. She blames the paramedics for not being fast enough. She blames herself for leaving, for pulling him back in with both hands, for not pulling him back to bed after her mother died. She has lost everyone now. 

He appears in her room one night, but totally different then she would’ve expected. He looks the way he did 23 years ago, not the way he did when he died. “I’m back in Oregon,” he tells her. “You’re dead here. Car accident. We lost nine minutes.”

They are like ghosts to each other, and they can only touch at night, for some reason. Scully quits the Bureau and moves back to the house with her dog. She waits for him to come every night. It’s not hard. It keeps her from thinking too much about things. “I went to your funeral today,” he whispers.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers back. 

He tells her that it is still 1993 there, future uncertain, undecided, and that her family is alive, his family is alive, and he isn’t sure of anything anymore. “Nothing’s happening the way it did before,” he tells her. She wonders if that is heaven and she’ll just never get there. Or maybe she is in Hell. Her dog dies. She is alone again.

Years pass. Mulder looks a little different every time he visits. It’s 1994. It’s 1997. It’s 2000, and the world didn’t end. “I know Samantha’s alive,” he tells her. “I just need to find her.” Other times, he tells her he misses her. She misses him, too.

“I’ll be here forever,” she tells him one night, when they look like the same age again. “I’m never leaving.”

“Maybe I’ll be there someday,” Mulder replies.

 

_ one where they don’t find each other _

Mulder goes to Skyland Mountain.

It's for several reasons, the most plausible being that there were two abductions there, in his dream. But also because he keeps dreaming of when she was taken.  _ Mulder! I need your help! _ The fact that he came so close to being able to save her. If he hadn't lingered at the car so long, if the tram hadn't been stalled, if he'd let Duane Barry die in that office…

_ I could've saved her. _

It was more than that. The abduction led to her cancer, her children, her alien DNA… if he'd gotten there sooner, he could've gotten Barry away from her, left before the ship came. He could've held her as she cried into his shirt, the way she had after Pfaster. He could've saved them years of pain.

He has to remind himself that it was just a dream, so he goes to Skyland Mountain. He plays the radio all the way up and doesn’t hear any of the words. He passes a car on the way up, and for a wild second, thinks it’s her. “Wishful thinking,” he mutters.

He searches the entire mountain like he did the first time. It starts to rain. He pretends it’s the same lights, and a search party is aiding him, and he could find her, hurt and traumatized, screams muffled by a dish towel and ropes taut around her wrists, but alive, because death was never an option. He thinks he sees her silhouetted against the moon.

“She was never here,” he says bitterly, and drives home.

 

_ one where it never happened in the first place _

“You okay, Mulder?” she asks as he glances down at his watch.

“Yeah, I’m just, uh…”

“What’re you looking for?”

The car slips, swerves on the slick road. He slams his foot into the break, which squeal with protest as the car stops just short of hitting the tree.

“Jesus!” Scully gasps, with her hand pressed against the dashboard.

“You okay?” he asks immediately, heart racing with the adrenaline of avoiding near death. 

“Mm hmm.”

Mulder unbuckles his seatbelt, and opens the door. “You drive.”

“I - no, that’s really not necessary,” Scully says, releasing her handful of mystery substance back into her pocket.

“Come on. That way, we’ll both be in less danger, and, well, if you crash, then the Bureau will pursue you for damages done to a Bureau car,” he says with a grin.

They pass each other in the rain, rounding the front of the car, and Scully tugs his sleeve. “Near your X,” she says, motioning to his mark he left in the road.

“I knew there was something about this place,” he replies. 

She drives them back to the hotel with much more rough stops then he would’ve done himself. Probably best that he does the driving from now on, he thinks, and is about to say so before looking at her again. She looks like a teenager in her damp jacket. She also looks stronger than he’d originally thought. Her hand was slick in his, but her grip was like a vise. Someone taught her how to shake hands, probably her father. Dana Scully.

“Hey, Scully,” he says. “I want to tell you about my sister.”

 

_ one where they found each other sooner _

When he appears in her doorway, it’s all she can do not to leap out of bed, and tear across the room to him.  _ It’s not real, it’s not real, _ she reminds herself sternly, and curls her fingers in so that her nails prick her palms. (They’re sharp; did she like manicures in 1993? She can’t remember a time that they didn’t terrify her, bring back sick memories from her two captivities by a fucking death fetishist.) “Agent Mulder,” she starts, trying to iron anything besides their old formalities - less than that, even - out of her voice.

“ _ Scully _ ,” he says desperately. He moves towards the bed. She flings her arm upwards towards him, reaching for him without thinking, and he grabs her hand in his and brings it to his mouth, closing his eyes.

“Mulder?” she gasps. “Do you… do you remember?” Remember what, she’s not sure, because it’s not real, but it was real to her, and could it be real to him too.

He kisses her hand, holding tightly to it, eyes still closed. “Do  _ you _ remember?” he whispers. “You were dead, Scully.”

She rises on her knees, moves closer to him and touches his cheek with her free hand. “So were you,” she whispers.

Mulder pulls her up against him, arms going around her tightly. “God, are you okay?” She nods into his shirtfront. “What happened?” 

Scully pulls back to look at him. He is there, all mussed hair and wet eyes, and it's like nothing ever changed, like it's 2016 and not 1993, just for a second. “I don't know,” she says honestly. “But I think this is our next chance.”


End file.
